Theoretical Hallucinations

My friendship with Jacques Derrida is a subject of some curiosity among certain conservative fellow travellers. However, equally baffling to some was my affection for the American pragmatist Richard Rorty. Unlike Derrida, whom Roger Scruton never met, Rorty was someone whom Scruton and I both knew personally. Scruton met Rorty during the filming of a roundtable discussion about “Beauty and Consolation” in the late ’90s, which is still available to view online. Around the same time, I published several articles defending him from the postmodern Left. Subsequently, we met at the Sundance Ranch in Utah and became friends.

Unlike Derrida, who was personally charismatic and of striking appearance, Rorty was very much a conventional academic professor. Quintessentially American in the best sense, he was extraordinarily learned, and yet he was also painfully shy and reserved. Indeed, the sparkle evidenced in his writings belies a man who was strangely disconnected and detached. What attracted me to him was not so much his groundbreaking book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), even if that work was both original and highly Hegelian in tone. It was the fact that this powerfully intelligent and shy man was a leftist and yet also an unwavering patriot. Like Derrida, Rorty was, as he put it, “militantly anticommunist.” He believed that “the war against Stalin was as legitimate, and as needed, as the war against Hitler.” Indeed, he went further, writing with unconcealed passion:

Our Russian and Polish opposite numbers did not want a separate peace. They wanted liberation from a thuggish, cruel, and seemingly invincible tyranny. Unless America had fought the Cold war, they now believe, they would never have been freed.

That sentence could well have been written by Scruton.

I do not lump all leftists into the same morally degenerate category. My question is always: where do they stand in relation to tyranny? Are they like Noam Chomsky, who famously made excuses for Pol Pot’s evil experiment in Cambodia; or are they like George Orwell, who poured scorn on his “pacifist” fellow leftists for “equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough”? Rorty was no conservative, although he certainly looked like one. He was, however, a man who spent his career defending reform over revolution, and traditional Orwellian leftism over postmodern posturing. He wrote favourably about Derrida and Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Kant. He was at the core of cutting-edge debates on the philosophy of language, representationalism, and realism. Despite that, he never betrayed his old fashioned leftist views that, politically at least, would have put him on the same side as many who read this magazine.

Rorty died in 2006, and thus he never saw the rise of Donald Trump. Yet, several years ago, he posthumously rose to international prominence well beyond the confines of philosophy and cultural debate. In a book published in 1998, Achieving Our Country, he wrote that, at some point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strong man to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

In other words, Rorty was accusing his own side of “theoretical hallucinations” that are totally divorced from practical politics, and which will inevitably lead people to turn rightwards, hence his distinction between the reformist Left and the cultural Left. The reformist Left comprises those like Orwell and Rorty himself—those who debate “specific social practices and specific changes in those practices.” Conversely, there is nothing specific about the cultural Left, which “often seems convinced that the nation state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics.”

Rorty set out to infuriate the cultural Left by describing their dark, unhinged, and hysterical vision of reality thus:

Stories about the webs of power and the insidious influence of a hegemonic ideology do for this Left what stories about the Lamanites did for Joseph Smith … Stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural leftists the only thing they really want to hear. To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which the citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce.

Rorty was no Marxist, and yet he surely would have agreed that even Marx would have disdained the cultural Left. For all the horrors that flowed from his diabolical dialectic, Marx rightly believed that practical engagement with the world was a prerequisite for self-fulfilment. Indeed, the centrepiece of Marxist thought was the Hegelian confrontation between master and slave—a confrontation that illustrated the essential nature of real work as a means of overcoming natural alienation. What currently passes itself off as leftwing activism—think of Greta Thunberg or the trans-rights warriors—would have been anathema to Marx. That is because the entire ideology of the so-called cultural Left is predicated on the deception that an individual can invent himself outside the social and natural context to which he belongs.

In short, to label the cultural Left “Marxist” is a complete misnomer. If anything, they belong to that category of estranged individuals that Hegel deemed “hedonists.” For Hegel, the hedonist “is aware only of himself” at the expense of the “ethical polity” in which individuals are engaged in common pursuits rooted in law and custom. Self-invention is, thus, the enemy of self-recognition—something achieved through practical engagement with the world, society, and what Hegel called “Spirit” (art, religion, and philosophy). Marx, of course, believed that culture or Spirit was “false consciousness” that only deepened our alienation. But Hegel shows that if we remain at the rudimentary stage of existence in which work is our principal means of self-satisfaction and recognition, then we shall forever suffer the torment of estrangement. Indeed, the history of horror that constitutes the Marxist experiment has only served to vindicate Hegel, and to show that mortal misery is the inevitable consequence of denying Spirit.

So let us not, therefore, conflate the Marxist with the cultural Left. Both are bad, but at least Marxism was intellectually grounded. Evil as it was, it still understood that when you have an entire generation aware only of itself, you are inviting complete social breakdown. Rorty had many prophetic insights, not least of which was that people will look for a strongman when madness masquerades as the norm. However, even more prescient, in my view, was his belief that the cultural Left will pollute the mind with theoretical hallucinations. What else could we call the vast majority of courses delivered to our university students in English and Sociology Departments? What else could we call the reasoning of those who believe that the facts of biology are inconsequential when deciding what gender to adopt on any given morning? What else, indeed, could we label the ravings of those who cheer the murder of a young genius who, armed only with reason and the scriptures, sought to debate the victims of the cultural Left out of their delusions?

Rorty was correct: we live in a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce. It is a world poisoned by a demonic ideology that craves intellectual respectability. The strength of Marxism was that it was intellectually coherent, even if it was also intellectually corrupt in its theory and criminal in its practice. The cultural Left, on the other hand, is intellectually barren, dangerously demonic, and a product of minds that cannot think beyond the next article on ‘victim studies.’ As Rorty put it:

Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than of merely economic selfishness.

I have spent my career debating Marxists of all shades. Normally, they slip into default mode and resort to Marxist mantras or stock phrases that, in their mind at least, cannot be corrupted. However, one small dose of Hegel and history is usually enough to sober them up. In our Gothic world of theoretical hallucinations, there is not even a chance of genuine debate. One must either consent to the hallucination or else shut up. Either one may belong to what Harold Bloom calls “the school of resentment,” in which they train their students “to clothe their resentment in jargon,” or else one must run the risk of death. For that, it now seems, is the punishment meted out for disagreement in a world in which the “Father of lies” feels completely at home.

This essay appears in the Winter 2025 issue of The European Conservative, Number 37:128-130.